Untrue

10

With Burial’s 2006 debut, it helped to have some investment in dubstep; Untrue is for everyone. Or at least anyone who’s ever walked home alone on some late night, soaking in the creaky sounds of a city asleep. No album in 2007 conveyed so much loneliness through the sheer palpability of its atmosphere. To listen to Untrue is to be thrust inside a world whose blurred dimensions are marked by hisses, crackles, and indeterminate noises somewhere in the distance. But the record will be best remembered for its ethereal singers, beamed in from another plane and wailing away into the void. Their voices, which are key to the record’s wide appeal, still don’t work quite as expected. Rather than humanizing or softening the stark backdrop, they reinforce the music’s sense of alienation. They’re the voices you miss; the ones you’ll probably never hear again. –Mark Richardson

From Here We Go Sublime

9

Philosophers and poets use the notion of the sublime to capture the feeling that comes from witnessing something so vast and stunning that language is rendered moot. Axel Willner, on his solo debut From Here We Go Sublime, has seemingly taken it upon himself to do just that. His mixture of quickly repetitive glitches, deep house, and lush washes of sound may be far from revolutionary, but his synthesis is virtuosic: The melodies from “Silent” and “Across the Ice” consist solely of numbed vowel sounds; 10-minute epic “The Deal” floats an ethereal Elisabeth Fraser-sounding vocal over the softest, slightest rhythmic variations; and the title track exhales the Flamingos’ doo-wop vocals, which hover and disappear like puffs of chilled breath. From Here We Go Sublime was released on the cusp of this past spring, but it sounds even better as winter tightens its grip. –Eric Harvey

Mirrored

8

You know the costume parties where everyone gets lazy or cops out-- bad sweaters, sunglasses, funny hats-- and then someone shows up in a full-on gorilla suit? That would be Battles, the unlikely instrumental supergroup featuring four serious musicians from far-flung backgrounds who congealed into one elastic, impishly inhuman groove machine on this year’s Mirrored. Displaying humor and charm without words, yet still feeling authorless and monolithic, the album calls attention only to its machinations: The most endurance-testing riffs, the most tweaked vocals, the tallest crash cymbals. Other artists preened, strutted, crooned, and sauntered to the top in 2007, but from their jaw-dropping half-man/half-laptop/all-amazing compositions down to their design sense, no one showed up to the party as prepared as Battles. –Jason Crock

Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga

7

Spoon’s sixth album serves as a reaffirmation of some of the group’s greatest gifts: concision, efficiency, and an indomitable knack for doing more with less. It’s not that Britt Daniel has less to say: Even the most deceptively spare songs (like the atmospheric hiccup “The Ghost of You Lingers”) pack so many ideas into their brief spans that they don’t just bear close listening but grow in impact with each successive one. The group’s pairing of melody and ruthless economy injects idiosyncratic pop songs like “You Got Yr. Cherry Bomb” and “The Underdog” with such wonderfully weird and inventive craft that reveling in their ingenuity and tapping your toes become inextricably linked activities, making the disc the perfect mind/body split: blowing the former while moving the latter. –Joshua Klein

Strawberry Jam

6

Whimsy is a trait best served in small doses, and no question Animal Collective’s Strawberry Jam is steeped in it. But what tops the group’s kaleidoscopic swirl of surreal strangeness is its sense of sonic wonder, relishing the unlimited potential of colliding sounds in the sampler age. Strawberry Jam shapes runaway ideas into something greater than the sum of their mystery parts. A perfect companion to AC member Panda Bear’s Person Pitch, the record finds Avey Tare taking the reins and shaping chaotic songs like “Peacebone”, “For Reverend Green”, and “Chores” into twisted pop gems. The only missing piece of the puzzle is a sold-out crowd singing and dancing along to each blurry, burbling, deliriously blissed-out song like they’re not half as bizarre as they really are. –Joshua Klein

Hissing Fauna, Are You the Destroyer?

5

Whereas most people seek professional counseling or self-help gurus, Kevin Barnes remedied his relationship and depression woes by pulling his head out of the psych-pop clouds and making the best album of his life. This therapeutic LP also holds a paradoxical distinction as Barnes’ most challenging and most widely received work to date. Sure, there’s this Georgie Fruit alter-ego running amok, ripping off Ziggy Stardust, interchangeably wishing sex and violence upon women, and frightening off many long-time Of Montreal die-hards. But behind all the glam and soul theatrics, Barnes just wants to talk love and sadness. Despite wearing his heart on a rhinestone sleeve, he humbly begs for chemical stability, religious epiphany, and any other means of dragging himself out of the dumps. Amazingly, amidst the emotional havoc, Barnes’ melodic clarity remains as sharp as ever, making Hissing Fauna a perfect storm of catharsis and craftsmanship. –Adam Moerder

In Rainbows

4

The fact that OK Computer-era holdover “Nude” finally ended up on In Rainbows is both ironic and fitting. The chorus is soggy even by Radiohead standards: “Don't get any big ideas/ They're not gonna happen.” Over the last decade, Radiohead have come up with so many grand schemes, and nearly all of them came to pass. In 2000, they released an album that subverted and warped everything that made them famous-- somehow making them even more famous. This year, they decided to let fans decide how much they wanted to pay for their album-- and, if reports are to be believed, ended up collecting more money from the release than they could’ve earned from a major-label deal. Seems like Radiohead have a knack for these big ideas. Then again, the music on the new album consists of much smaller notions and subtle pleasures.

In Rainbows is classic Radiohead, but it’s hardly a retread. The paradoxes don’t end there; it’s easy-going but tense, comfortable and anxious, fatalistic and hopeful. During the album’s most cathartic release, on “All I Need”, Thom Yorke wails, “It's all right/ It's all wrong,” while stuck in some blissful limbo. The big ideas, whether momentous or ethereal, are still in strong supply, and yes, they're still happening. –Ryan Dombal

Kala

3

Kala’s music mirrors its politics: A seething economy of sampling, borrowing, and sharp deals. Continent-crossing pop is still M.I.A.’s M.O., but her second album adds time travel-- reaching back to childhood Bollywood hits on the rapturous “Jimmy” and rave memories on “XR2”, then forward to a world of cheap AKs, insurrection, and “selfish little roamers.” M.I.A. believes the children are our future, and though the bush gang on “Mango Pickle Down River” are cuter, the ones singing on “Paper Planes” are fixing to kill.

That song’s Clash sample mixes melancholy into the beats, but most of Kala builds on Arular’s thrill-power. “If you're dead from the waist down it's easy staying down”, she raps on “World Town”, so constant joyful motion is the answer-- a new noise, dance, slogan, joke, or hook every half minute. This M.I.A. is poppier, noisier, riskier, and more significant than before. Even if she’s only half-right about the world, then you and I are probably fucked, but our slide into chaos could have no more remarkable soundtrack. –Tom Ewing

Sound of Silver

2

You play some rock, you do some drugs, you hit the clubs, you make some beats, you’re young. Eventually you get older and your back hurts if you’re out too late and you get a real job, start doing “unplugged” sets, and sell off your collection except for the good Bowie records. Or: You’re James Murphy, who realized that growing (the fuck) up could make his rock deeper and his dance music bolder, and that actually there’s no reason for them not to be the same thing. Of course, the second LCD album is informed by the records Murphy devoured as a kid, from Steve Reich to Yello, but it’s also fresh enough to raise chills: angry, elegiac, hilarious, totally idiomatic, sequenced as well as any LP this decade, and given both mass and momentum by his perspective and experience. I cannot wait to hear the records he’s making when he’s 55. –Douglas Wolk

Person Pitch

1

When it came out this spring, Person Pitch seemed like a soundtrack to the thaw. Coming two-and-a-half years after Young Prayer, Panda Bear (Noah Lennox)’s spare and quietly devastating predecessor, the new album brought with it the vague expectation of that first warm breeze. Summer hit, and the record delivered on its initial promise: Lennox has said that he wanted to capture in sound the feeling of sunlight in Lisbon, and someday, when we're all old and senile, we may erroneously recall visiting Portugal in 2007. The music’s oranges and reds and golds were perfect for the fall, and now that the days are short and the ground icy, Person Pitch sounds like something we’ll be curling up with in hibernation. It remains a fixture.

Compared to our No. 1 album last year, the Knife’s Silent Shout, Person Pitch is less likely to be a social experience. This is a headphones record. Still, despite its inward focus, Person Pitch doesn't feel closed-off. Sometimes when I’m listening, I imagine what it might have been like to make it. I picture Lennox at his computer borrowing sounds and samples from odd places and shaping them into something personal and true. It seems like something to aspire to. With its bright harmonies, loops that veer from lulling to ecstatic, and reverb that lends each sound a hazy twinkle, Person Pitch feels friendly and conversational, if beautifully streaked with psychedelic disorientation. But mostly, it just feels overwhelmingly positive and unfailingly generous. –Mark Richardson